I'm a Canuck, and I celebrate Turkey Day when 91% of those that do, do.
'Course, the fact that I live in San Diego, CA might have something to do with it.
Interestingly, I will not be doing a traditional Thanksgiving meal this year: I'm getting together with a friend and we will likely partake of:
Brunch: Lox omelet: smoked salmon folded into a three egg omelet with tomatoes and capers.
Snack: Whole Grain Organic Pizza Toast: Fresh roast garlic on whole grain with flax bread, topped with Roma tomatoes, capers, grated Parmesan and Prosciutto, lightly baked and accented with cracked black
pepper and a balsamic vinaigrette drizzle
Dinner: Surf 'n Turf: Rare filet mignon on sizzling roasted garlic butter with shrimp and scallops in a saffron butter dill sauce, and a side of lemon-steamed broccoli.
The next day, I'll probably make a simple veal scaloppini with capers and whole wheat angel hair pasta for dinner.
I usually make a big pot of lean chili on the weekends and this weekend will be no exception.
I'd like to see a cite. I remember reading about the "Bell Box" a few years ago, and it's inventer's troubles witht he law, but recent searches have turned up nothing. Perhaps my google-fu is not strong enough.
The "Bell Box" was essentially a computer, designed to accept anonymous wagers, cryptographically signed with an included public key, as to when, where, and how, someone would die.
The point was not really to wager on someone's death. No, the point was that very unpopular people would have such a large pool of small wagers accumulated, that at some point, the risk of getting caught for the murder would be perceived to be less than the payoff for predicting the exact circumstances of the death and seeing to it that they occured.
Combine the Bell Box with the banking secrecy laws in some countries, and, well...
IIRC, the inventor was arrested for having invented it, as a terrorist, but I have no evidence to back that up. No known prototype was ever made.
Yes, though I do not speak for Microsoft in any capacity.
I was employed by Microsoft for a while (I figured it was a good way to understand them first hand -- I worked setting up internal automated test labs and mobile services, not producing software for licensing.), and I used Linux exclusively at home, though during my employment at Microsoft I was careful to not contribute ANYTHING back to the OSS/Free Software communities other than the odd bug report.
There was no prejeduce against a personal perference for GNU/Linux, BSD, and in fact many coworkers liked it. But, it was not the "Microsoft Way" for our customers.
I once brought in a HD MythTV box running on a nano-ITX board in a SilverStone case to contrast it to a MS HTPC (which I found low def and noisy at the time). Sure, they could have had the details of how it was put together - it was all open or free software anyway. A few people we upset at how well it worked but pointed out every little "glitch", as in, "We'dve designed the menus better." I'd agree that different, perhaps, but "better"? That arrogance, I think, is one thing that stifles them.
MSFT is like any large company: they're in business to make money. They aren't "evil" any more than any large business is "evil": they will get away with whatever they can. Call it evil if you must, but it strikes me as human nature to (ab)use power when one can.
Like buggy whip manufactures, the recording industry, motion picture industry, the mass-market proprietary software industry will eventually go the way of the dinasaur, though not without a tooth and nail fight to the death, with lobbied-for laws to their benefit, and other tactics. There will always be a place for proprietary software, for custom, niche customers and embedded special-purpose devices.
In order to survive, Microsoft will have to adapt. IBM had to adapt or die in the 80s and 90s. They have the resources to do this. And, I think they are well on their way. At some point, software will become an expense for them, and not a revenue stream.
I know something about the hows, whys, and schedule, of their adaptation, but obviously, I am not at liberty to discuss those details.
The point to note, however, is that one should not assume that a company that sees a threat to their business model will simply lay down and die. It will fight, in a variety of ways, some perceived as clean, some as dirty, but it will fight. Success is not guaranteed, and complacency is fatal.
It is public knowledge that Microsoft has a Linux lab. It would be foolish to think that they do not hire Linux enthuisiasts who do not necessarily buy into the Free/Open Software philosophy.
Sure, one *should* take responsibility for one's actions and sane people do.
However, repeated abuse (and by this I mean any action that the abuser would not wish done to them) causes people to lose their sanity.
Insane people are sometimes violent.
Ergo, abuse can be expected to precipitate violence. Call it "inciting to violence" if you will.
Saying that mature people don't respond violently to minor "pissing-offedness" doesn't fix the problem.
Does this mean we should treat each other with kid gloves all the time? No, but perhaps if we treat eachother the way we'd like ourselves to be treated such violence would decrease.
Stories like these make me angry. I can imagine less sane people being driven to violence by them "in retaliation". I'm not sure if that would be such a bad thing: the self-proclaimed spokespeople for society just don't seem to get the idea that abuse breeds retaliatory violence. Perhaps more evidence of this might change their minds. Somehow, though, while eventually solving the problem of abuse, I don't think such an approach is optimal.
And a funny thing about "life": sometimes the "pissed-on" get pissed-off and start becoming violent. This should surprise no one any more than a wild, or even domesticated, animal attacking a human at random, when frightened.
Pissing people off INVITES them to act violently. Calling such reactions insane does not discharge the responsibility from those who drove them insane to begin with.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art faces the loss of a third of its annual budget, even eviction, because the mayor of New York City finds a painting in an exhibit offensive.
Serves them right if they're accepting public funding (How does the mayor control their funding: directly, or indirectly via the weight of his opinions?) -- it seems natural if the "public" funds them, the "public" gets to call the shots, as it were, via their elected representative.
If anything that's an argument against accepting public funds -- you lose your autonomy.
There's a self-correcting mechanism to things that are widely unpopular, though, that does not require any "censorship from above" to "correct": unpopular opinions have, with them, a hidden cost of defense against those who would use force to silence them. It isn't a question of whether use of such force is right -- it just boils down to the statistical chance of someone being pissed off enough about what you say, to act against you.
For example, should I have a right to say (warning: offensive example follows), "Niggers should leave!" in a public place? If you value freedom of speech, you'd have to say yes, perhaps reluctantly. However, that is not the same as the privelege of having society defend me against the possibility of being battered for such a comment. Most would find such a response wrong (absent any physical action on my part), but certainly understandable (as would I). The burden of defending against the consequences of my speech, if I choose to excersize my freedom of same, rests on my shoulders.
If I think it so important to express an idea that the risks I might face are worth it, in my opinion, then so be it. However, I can't simultaneously claim a freedom of speech and insist that I be protected from the response it might cause: it is up to the discretion of the "publicly funded" police to defend me only to the point of what the public considers "acceptable". Any defense I require beyond that is my responsibility.
Historically, the United States, via the Supreme Court, has been very tolerant even of the expression of racial or religous prejeduce: I'm reminded of the Nazi march (all seven of then, IIRC) through Skokie, IL. some decades ago. (Personally, I'd have let the march happen, but not provide a shred of police protection - let the Nazis hire their own guards).
Is there a risk that this would mean that widely unpopular ideas would get silenced, out of fear of retribution? I don't think so. Anonymity allows an idea to be expressed without identifying the protagonist -- if an idea is interesting (and controversial ideas are, by definition, interesting because of the controversy), it should stand on it's own, regardless of who's promoting it.
The best we can do, then, for expression of unpopular ideas, is to not render such expression outright illegal, but neither should defense be provided for their protagnonists ad absurdum. And that, my friends, is how the First Amendment should be interpreted, IMHO.
In Canada, you are responsible for making sure your bills are paid on time, even if payment is made by mail, and the mail service is down (i.e. carrier strike).
Since most utility bills and credit card bills can be paid at banks, this isn't much of a problem, though.
Of course, the idea that you pay according to someone's preferred method (i.e.mail) and it's YOUR problem if that method fails, still strikes me as repugnant, but Canadians are generally sheep.
The biggest practical problem with the status quo is having to make payment (say, at a bank) when a cheque is already in the mail -- too often both cheques get cashed (stop payments are expensive), and, in some cases, accounts wind up overdrawn until the mess gets straigtened out.
The better utilities will generally give people a break during a postal strike, but they don't have to.
Isn't there a (short) practical limit to 1394 cable lengths that would render them inappropriate in this application?
Essentially, what's been done here is to lay a time-division multiplexed audio-data stream on a protocol designed for a shared medium, that, in this application, well, isn't.
That's O.K.: Ethernet hardware is rather cheap, and Cat5 cabling is ubiquitous. I've often thought of designing something similar for distributing uncompresed digital audio throughout my home, though IP-based so routers could handle it.
There's a couple problems with this approach, though:
1) Combining async and sync traffic is problematic. Here, a dedicated data channel has been piggybacked on the syncronous packet stream. ATM works pretty much the same way, except allows for dunamic allocation of bandwidth end to end.
2) Notice that there is one master clock source. This is fine, if you're sending data to one amp (which has a stable master clock, and so doesn't have to endure arrival sample jitter. But what if you have amps all over the place? If one is a master clock source, the others will suffer sample jitter. Furthermore, this makes combination of audio packets on different segments problematic.
You'd need a switched star arrangement if you have multiple sources and multiple destinations. Furthermore, a single source could only talk to a single destination at a time over a single segment. Scratch the idea of an autio server.
This is why most devices in the technical spec are daisy-chained, by the way.
3) Finally, regardless of how much audio traffic is on the link, each receiver has to work almost at wire speed to process each packet in time.
IOW, you have to be prepared to send or receive 16 audio channels regardless of how many you need for your end to end application.
I do wonder, though, if ATM (which can also run over Cat5 cabling) wouldn't have been a better choice: there's even a low-speed ATM-25 (25 Mb/s) variant.
I lived there for 36 years until I came to the U.S. on an TN-1 (now H1B) visa two years ago. While I can't speak for everyone, I expect that my experience is typical:
1. If you quit at a bad time, you're likely to be blacklisted as "unreliable", and not be able to get another job.
2. If you're unemployed for any length of time, it is harder to get another job (some employers require periods of unemployment to be accounted for when applying for a job).
3. Overtime only has to be paid to salaried employees to the extent that you make minimum wage for 37-1/2 hours a week (maybe 40 some places), and 150% of that over 40 hours a week. There are special rules for working holidays, etc.
4. Two years ago, there was a real glut of IT people hungry for your job.
5. In Quebec, skills don't matter -- you have to communicate in French to get a job (i.e. it is a legal requirement) and can get fired if you don'd do it well enough. English-speaking IT people constantly have to prove that they speak French well enough.
6. Some of the issues above (like periods of unemployment mattering when applying for a job) are clearly illegal. But, in Canada, a lawyer can't take a case on a contingency basis. In practice, this means that if you're not independantly wealthy (i.e. need a job in the first place), or the beneficiary of a charity, you can't sue.
7. In Canada, the IT worker is in a "select, priveleged" profession and earns a high salary (typically US$35,000 when I left, though I earned more). Because of the socialist climate, such people are considered a "resource" and are expected to "support" the country via taxation on their earnings. Not working, threatinging to not work, or anything that would mean not getting paid, is considered "anti-social".
I had helped someone solve a nasty problem, and it being used in a commercial venture, they wanted to pay me. Company policy didn't permit this since I was a 17 year old kid, and not an official contractor or employee, so a gift of any book in print was offered.
Without blinking, I asked for (and received) "The Art of Computer Programming" (all three volumes). It still sits on my shelf and I use it as reference material, particularly to point novice programmers where I work to some algorithm they need explained.
Sometimes they complain, "But it's 25 years old!" My reply is usually something like, "Well, then you've got 25 years to catch up on... this is the best start I can think of."
Most places you work, there will be some formal "process" that is perceived to let the factory model of production be applied to software development. There are two parties that have a vested interest in this: those that push a particular design process (typically CASE tool vendors), and those that want close estimates and the ability to interchange designers and programmers at will (managers).
Unfortunately, ANY such process, while it may have it's benefits, isn't perfect. True wisdom is knowing when "the Process" doesn't apply.
A few thoughts:
1) You can't think of everything up front, no mater HOW GOOD you think you are. This only works for small systems and systems with few well-defined intercomponent interfaces. You'll struve for the latter, but you won't get it first time around (or even second), but you'll get closer every time.
2) Anything which divorces implementation from design runs the usual risks associated with multiple views of the same think. Code often gets out of sync with UML, for example, though this can be audited for, and incrementally corrected. I do this CONSTANTLY. It is a form of overhead, though, and must be taken into account.
3) While metrics are great for predicting project side and time, collecting them often brings up a Heisenberg Uncertantly Principle effect: the mere act of measurement distorts that being measured. In some cases this can slow down the productivity of your best people to that of the mean -- that's expensive because you're best are likely an order of magnitude more productive than your worst, and so generate far more metrics to collect, even though many of them are useless. This flies directly in the face of rapid prototyping where the goal is to make things with the intent of throwing them away.
4)Don't waste your time auditing for mistakes that you are very unlikely to make. Of course, you need to collect some metrics to find out what mistakes each individual DOES make, but, in the absense of these, most programmers and designers have a good idea of where the mine fields are and ALREADY take extra care.
5)Don't come up with a "one size fits all" audit procedure. Some things are hard to audit for, and not all reviewers will have the skill to do this.
6)Do try to get the machine to do most of the work. If there is a "coding style standard", invest in a prettyprinter program instead of having people count spaces. Reading other's code isn't the same as iteratively developing your own. For example, I like my code to be fairly dense, so more of it fits into an editor window. This way, I can review the last thing I coded for correctness while I code the next one.
7)If something is too error-prone for some to use, but a great productivity booster to others, do let those others use it with the caveat that with this freedom comnes responsibility.
8)Remember that programmers and designers are not interchangable - the difference between the best and worst will be on about one order of magnitude (i.e. a factor of 10). Do not fall into the trap of hindering your best because the average has difficulty understanding a particular technique - if it is well documented (say anything in "Design Patterns", or even "The Art of Computer Programming" (I'm dating myself here), it should be fair game, and the onus on the neophyte to learn from it.
9)Remember to not etch process in stone. Third-party code you license will likely NOT follow your coding standards, and woe unto him who changes it when it comes time to integrate a source upgrade. Neither is it perfect. Don't trust the documentation -- read the code. If I had a dollar for everytime I say code not match documentation, I'd be rich.
10)Document what matters, and keep it short. The basic idea on a design or sub-design should be expressable in no more than a page or two. Don't linger on unnecessary details unless it is a code API.
11)Be flexible. While your process may be best 95% of the time, you will be burned when you try to apply it the other 5% of the time.
12)Know when to violate process, and how to weigh the risks of doing so. There is certainly risk here, but it is not infinite, and it might be far less than the risk of not violating process. This usually happens when (a) schedules are tightened unexpectedly, and/or (b) you run into the 5% scenario that your process handles badly.
13)Don't get bogged down in overhead. If you make a one line change that corrects a clear oversight, don't fill in a three page form, unless the oversight looks like it may be a systemic problem.
14)Finally, never assume anything. You're always playing the odds. Learn to manage uncertainty.
1) Companies have a right to use humour in their commercials. Pepsi hats, jackets, bags, skateboards, etc are OBVIOUSLY not the on the same level as a FREAKIN JET. Any moron can see that. Yes. ANY MORON.
Well, yes, except this wasn't simply a commercial. It was a promotion with points redemable for prizes. The laws tend to be strict in such cases to make it difficult for the company to say, "we were kidding". The underlying principle here is that the expense of a disclaimer in such a case is trivial to the overall cost of the promotion, so why not the disclaimer?
2) You people are the reason people who make pet shampoo have to put warning like "Don't microwave pet to dry" and their bottles. "But it didn't say!" Hey! I got this knife, and it didn't say not to stab anyone! I'm gonna sue!
Again, the purpose of a promotion is to give things away or offered in redemption for some premium. It is reasonable the presume that the things depicted as being given away actually will be. It would not be reasonable to presume that one could actually FLY the jet.
3) You're supporting frivolous law suits. This man KNEW it was a joke. Do you HONESTLY BELIEVE that he thought he was going to get the plane? Hell no, he even raised money for the law suit BEFORE TRYING TO GET THE PLANE!
Here,you may have a point. If Pepsico can show that he THOUGHT it was a joke, they can call him on it. However, I see nothing wrong in raising money for a suit to collect something that Pepsico could reasonably be expected to DENY having offered. This is not the same as thinking it was a joke, just an error in Pepsico's judgement.
4) If you guys had your way every comedian would have to stop at the end of each joke and explain that it was just a joke.
No, clearly from context, one knows that comedians in a club or on TV are telling jokes and are not to be taken seriously.
5) I'm going to go sue segfault for their articles!!! Who cares if they're obviously bogus, I'm too stupid to realize it!
Except they're not offering you anything. Pepsico was.
6) The taco bell comercial where the dog is having a lawn sale where everything is $.39.... I mailed in $.39 for the Baby Grand piano.. I didn't get it!! LAWYER!!!
Here there is a depiction of a lawn sale, but no indication that it is open to YOU.
Obviously I think Pepsico goofed on this one, and should cough up the valye of the Jet, if they can't produce the jet itself.
Oh, and regarding the lady who was too "stupid" to know not to hold a cup of coffee between her legs in a moving car... apparantly she first tried to collect medical expenses, and when McD brushed her off she sued on the grounds that the coffee was too hot to consume. Apparantly, in the state where the event took place, food and beverages sold in a restaurant must be fit for immediate consumption, and had this been the case, here burns would not have been so severe. Perhaps she was willing to risk a minor burn, but not 3rd degree burns.
Then again, it's hard to take seriously any organization whose constitution contains the words "Secretary of Coca-Cola"...
One of the requirements for Prince Edward Island to join Canada as a Province in 1949 was that the Canadian Constitution be amended to decree the colour of margerine in Prince Edward Island.
Given that kind of lunacy (I can say disparaging things like that, having lost my Canadian residency, but retaining Citizenship), Secretary of Coca-Cola doesn't strike me as all that silly.
And for the many entrenched individualistic, Libertarian elements of the Net and Web, he is a nightmare: monopolistic and greedy and the purveyor of over-priced, ever obsolete, buggy software that exploits consumers and promotes computing ignorance.
And why is this a problem? After all, Gates has done nothing the prevent those who would make something better for themselves from doing so: [GNU]/Linux is proof of this.
Of course, the screams go up, you can't make money "selling Linux" (without something else on the side, like support). You can't buy a Linux distribution or get it pre-installed with the same ease. Finally, Billy-G's got all the distribution mechanisms sown up tight pushing his garbage around.
All true. But, all irrelevant.
The world doesn't owe you a profit -- if people value what you make (even if it is garbage) you will make one.
The world doesn't have to bend to your desires or make your life more convenient. In short, the world doesn't owe you the ability to get a Linux distro the way you might want to. There aren't any Indian restaurants close to where I live and I like Indian food. That's my tough -- I can buy a cookbook and prepare Chicken Vindaloo myself if I want.
If you want something better than Windoze, build it yourself. The freedom to do that, and to cooperate with others to the same ends is the only thing the world "ows" you.
Clearly, enough people thought it worthwhile to improve and expand on Linus Torvalds' personal operating system itch. They (we) did it not to "get rich" but to build somethibg better for ourselves. That this goal was achieved, beyond anyone's wildest dreams, serves to prove that Billy-G is no impedement what so ever to personal and collective effort.
Those who despise him for his wealth are just envious bastards who would think nothing of stealing if they could get away with it.
Of course, he still flogs useless garbage, IMNSHO, but if people are willing to buy it, who am I to interfere?
Re:Huray! Now, more people use C++!!
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GCC 2.95 Released
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· Score: 1
While I love C++ (when I'm not hacking together some assember - what a paradigm shift), as with all powerful things, the language can be horribly abused: derivation in place of aggregation, and so forth.
C++ adds to C the sort of things that serious programmers need to manage large projects. In many cases these things are overkill for small ones and just obfuscate things. Of course, it has a strong OO background (but that just reflects that sometimes an object-programming paradigm is what is desired).
To truely appreciate what C++ can do fo you, read "Design Patterns" by Gamma, Helm, et. al.
"Statisfaction guaranteed or your money cheerfully refunded," or something like that was their slogan.
Think about it: what defines "satisfaction"? The consumer, 100%. That's quite a tall promise to make.
But, in those days (the 60s) people were honest - they wouldn't order a bunch of new furniture, fora party, and request that they be refunded three days later because they weren't satisfied.
Now, I really, really, REALLY, want there to be a film adaptation of Neuromancer, don't get me wrong. But now that Stanley Kubrick is dead, I seriously doubt that anyone can do it justice.
While my first reaction was, "Oh, YESSS!" when reading the/. headline, I realized that this latest effort will either
a) fizzle out in pre-production;
b) suck really badly;
c) prove that Gibson was a one hit literary wonder (well, two: "Burning Chrome" was a great prequel/anthology, but "Count Zero" and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" were lacking), if he has anything to do with the screen play.
BTW, has anyone seen the North American release of "Eyes Wide Shut" yet? Do you know if Kubrick approved the editing necessary for the NC-17 rating? (I don't care how much nudity is in the original -- if Kubrick though some was unnecessary, I'm willing to see a cut version, if not, then no way.)
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I'm a Canuck, and I celebrate Turkey Day when 91% of those that do, do.
'Course, the fact that I live in San Diego, CA might have something to do with it.
Interestingly, I will not be doing a traditional Thanksgiving meal this year: I'm getting together with a friend and we will likely partake of:
Brunch: Lox omelet: smoked salmon folded into a three egg omelet with tomatoes and capers.
Snack: Whole Grain Organic Pizza Toast: Fresh roast garlic on whole grain with flax bread, topped with Roma tomatoes, capers, grated Parmesan and Prosciutto, lightly baked and accented with cracked black pepper and a balsamic vinaigrette drizzle
Dinner: Surf 'n Turf: Rare filet mignon on sizzling roasted garlic butter with shrimp and scallops in a saffron butter dill sauce, and a side of lemon-steamed broccoli.
The next day, I'll probably make a simple veal scaloppini with capers and whole wheat angel hair pasta for dinner.
I usually make a big pot of lean chili on the weekends and this weekend will be no exception.
The concept however, is a sound one.
The "Bell Box" was essentially a computer, designed to accept anonymous wagers, cryptographically signed with an included public key, as to when, where, and how, someone would die.
The point was not really to wager on someone's death. No, the point was that very unpopular people would have such a large pool of small wagers accumulated, that at some point, the risk of getting caught for the murder would be perceived to be less than the payoff for predicting the exact circumstances of the death and seeing to it that they occured.
Combine the Bell Box with the banking secrecy laws in some countries, and, well...
IIRC, the inventor was arrested for having invented it, as a terrorist, but I have no evidence to back that up. No known prototype was ever made.
I was employed by Microsoft for a while (I figured it was a good way to understand them first hand -- I worked setting up internal automated test labs and mobile services, not producing software for licensing.), and I used Linux exclusively at home, though during my employment at Microsoft I was careful to not contribute ANYTHING back to the OSS/Free Software communities other than the odd bug report.
There was no prejeduce against a personal perference for GNU/Linux, BSD, and in fact many coworkers liked it. But, it was not the "Microsoft Way" for our customers.
I once brought in a HD MythTV box running on a nano-ITX board in a SilverStone case to contrast it to a MS HTPC (which I found low def and noisy at the time). Sure, they could have had the details of how it was put together - it was all open or free software anyway. A few people we upset at how well it worked but pointed out every little "glitch", as in, "We'dve designed the menus better." I'd agree that different, perhaps, but "better"? That arrogance, I think, is one thing that stifles them.
MSFT is like any large company: they're in business to make money. They aren't "evil" any more than any large business is "evil": they will get away with whatever they can. Call it evil if you must, but it strikes me as human nature to (ab)use power when one can.
Like buggy whip manufactures, the recording industry, motion picture industry, the mass-market proprietary software industry will eventually go the way of the dinasaur, though not without a tooth and nail fight to the death, with lobbied-for laws to their benefit, and other tactics. There will always be a place for proprietary software, for custom, niche customers and embedded special-purpose devices.
In order to survive, Microsoft will have to adapt. IBM had to adapt or die in the 80s and 90s. They have the resources to do this. And, I think they are well on their way. At some point, software will become an expense for them, and not a revenue stream.
I know something about the hows, whys, and schedule, of their adaptation, but obviously, I am not at liberty to discuss those details.
The point to note, however, is that one should not assume that a company that sees a threat to their business model will simply lay down and die. It will fight, in a variety of ways, some perceived as clean, some as dirty, but it will fight. Success is not guaranteed, and complacency is fatal.
It is public knowledge that Microsoft has a Linux lab. It would be foolish to think that they do not hire Linux enthuisiasts who do not necessarily buy into the Free/Open Software philosophy.
Sure, one *should* take responsibility for one's actions and sane people do.
However, repeated abuse (and by this I mean any action that the abuser would not wish done to them) causes people to lose their sanity.
Insane people are sometimes violent.
Ergo, abuse can be expected to precipitate violence. Call it "inciting to violence" if you will.
Saying that mature people don't respond violently to minor "pissing-offedness" doesn't fix the problem.
Does this mean we should treat each other with kid gloves all the time? No, but perhaps if we treat eachother the way we'd like ourselves to be treated such violence would decrease.
Stories like these make me angry. I can imagine less sane people being driven to violence by them "in retaliation". I'm not sure if that would be such a bad thing: the self-proclaimed spokespeople for society just don't seem to get the idea that abuse breeds retaliatory violence. Perhaps more evidence of this might change their minds. Somehow, though, while eventually solving the problem of abuse, I don't think such an approach is optimal.
And a funny thing about "life": sometimes the "pissed-on" get pissed-off and start becoming violent. This should surprise no one any more than a wild, or even domesticated, animal attacking a human at random, when frightened.
Pissing people off INVITES them to act violently. Calling such reactions insane does not discharge the responsibility from those who drove them insane to begin with.
Serves them right if they're accepting public funding (How does the mayor control their funding: directly, or indirectly via the weight of his opinions?) -- it seems natural if the "public" funds them, the "public" gets to call the shots, as it were, via their elected representative.
If anything that's an argument against accepting public funds -- you lose your autonomy.
There's a self-correcting mechanism to things that are widely unpopular, though, that does not require any "censorship from above" to "correct": unpopular opinions have, with them, a hidden cost of defense against those who would use force to silence them. It isn't a question of whether use of such force is right -- it just boils down to the statistical chance of someone being pissed off enough about what you say, to act against you.
For example, should I have a right to say (warning: offensive example follows), "Niggers should leave!" in a public place? If you value freedom of speech, you'd have to say yes, perhaps reluctantly. However, that is not the same as the privelege of having society defend me against the possibility of being battered for such a comment. Most would find such a response wrong (absent any physical action on my part), but certainly understandable (as would I). The burden of defending against the consequences of my speech, if I choose to excersize my freedom of same, rests on my shoulders.
If I think it so important to express an idea that the risks I might face are worth it, in my opinion, then so be it. However, I can't simultaneously claim a freedom of speech and insist that I be protected from the response it might cause: it is up to the discretion of the "publicly funded" police to defend me only to the point of what the public considers "acceptable". Any defense I require beyond that is my responsibility.
Historically, the United States, via the Supreme Court, has been very tolerant even of the expression of racial or religous prejeduce: I'm reminded of the Nazi march (all seven of then, IIRC) through Skokie, IL. some decades ago. (Personally, I'd have let the march happen, but not provide a shred of police protection - let the Nazis hire their own guards).
Is there a risk that this would mean that widely unpopular ideas would get silenced, out of fear of retribution? I don't think so. Anonymity allows an idea to be expressed without identifying the protagonist -- if an idea is interesting (and controversial ideas are, by definition, interesting because of the controversy), it should stand on it's own, regardless of who's promoting it.
The best we can do, then, for expression of unpopular ideas, is to not render such expression outright illegal, but neither should defense be provided for their protagnonists ad absurdum. And that, my friends, is how the First Amendment should be interpreted, IMHO.
In Canada, you are responsible for making sure your bills are paid on time, even if payment is made by mail, and the mail service is down (i.e. carrier strike).
Since most utility bills and credit card bills can be paid at banks, this isn't much of a problem, though.
Of course, the idea that you pay according to someone's preferred method (i.e.mail) and it's YOUR problem if that method fails, still strikes me as repugnant, but Canadians are generally sheep.
The biggest practical problem with the status quo is having to make payment (say, at a bank) when a cheque is already in the mail -- too often both cheques get cashed (stop payments are expensive), and, in some cases, accounts wind up overdrawn until the mess gets straigtened out.
The better utilities will generally give people a break during a postal strike, but they don't have to.
subject says it all.
Isn't there a (short) practical limit to 1394 cable lengths that would render them inappropriate in this application?
Essentially, what's been done here is to lay a time-division multiplexed audio-data stream on a protocol designed for a shared medium, that, in this application, well, isn't.
That's O.K.: Ethernet hardware is rather cheap, and Cat5 cabling is ubiquitous. I've often thought of designing something similar for distributing uncompresed digital audio throughout my home, though IP-based so routers could handle it.
There's a couple problems with this approach, though:
1) Combining async and sync traffic is problematic. Here, a dedicated data channel has been piggybacked on the syncronous packet stream. ATM works pretty much the same way, except allows for dunamic allocation of bandwidth end to end.
2) Notice that there is one master clock source. This is fine, if you're sending data to one amp (which has a stable master clock, and so doesn't have to endure arrival sample jitter. But what if you have amps all over the place? If one is a master clock source, the others will suffer sample jitter. Furthermore, this makes combination of audio packets on different segments problematic.
You'd need a switched star arrangement if you have multiple sources and multiple destinations. Furthermore, a single source could only talk to a single destination at a time over a single segment. Scratch the idea of an autio server.
This is why most devices in the technical spec are daisy-chained, by the way.
3) Finally, regardless of how much audio traffic is on the link, each receiver has to work almost at wire speed to process each packet in time.
IOW, you have to be prepared to send or receive 16 audio channels regardless of how many you need for your end to end application.
I do wonder, though, if ATM (which can also run over Cat5 cabling) wouldn't have been a better choice: there's even a low-speed ATM-25 (25 Mb/s) variant.
I lived there for 36 years until I came to the U.S. on an TN-1 (now H1B) visa two years ago. While I can't speak for everyone, I expect that my experience is typical:
1. If you quit at a bad time, you're likely to be blacklisted as "unreliable", and not be able to get another job.
2. If you're unemployed for any length of time, it is harder to get another job (some employers require periods of unemployment to be accounted for when applying for a job).
3. Overtime only has to be paid to salaried employees to the extent that you make minimum wage for 37-1/2 hours a week (maybe 40 some places), and 150% of that over 40 hours a week. There are special rules for working holidays, etc.
4. Two years ago, there was a real glut of IT people hungry for your job.
5. In Quebec, skills don't matter -- you have to communicate in French to get a job (i.e. it is a legal requirement) and can get fired if you don'd do it well enough. English-speaking IT people constantly have to prove that they speak French well enough.
6. Some of the issues above (like periods of unemployment mattering when applying for a job) are clearly illegal. But, in Canada, a lawyer can't take a case on a contingency basis. In practice, this means that if you're not independantly wealthy (i.e. need a job in the first place), or the beneficiary of a charity, you can't sue.
7. In Canada, the IT worker is in a "select, priveleged" profession and earns a high salary (typically US$35,000 when I left, though I earned more). Because of the socialist climate, such people are considered a "resource" and are expected to "support" the country via taxation on their earnings. Not working, threatinging to not work, or anything that would mean not getting paid, is considered "anti-social".
...even if they're pets?
Thus, theft or killing such a tagged animal, renders the perp subject to prosecution for a felony.
I'm referring, of course, to the character in Neuromancer.
I will probably be in the market for an Ethernet card since I need one to connect to an ADSL bridge that I will (finally!) be getting soon.
3Com: GPLing your drivers makes it VERY likely that I'll buy one of yours. Way to go!
I had helped someone solve a nasty problem, and it being used in a commercial venture, they wanted to pay me. Company policy didn't permit this since I was a 17 year old kid, and not an official contractor or employee, so a gift of any book in print was offered.
Without blinking, I asked for (and received) "The Art of Computer Programming" (all three volumes). It still sits on my shelf and I use it as reference material, particularly to point novice programmers where I work to some algorithm they need explained.
Sometimes they complain, "But it's 25 years old!" My reply is usually something like, "Well, then you've got 25 years to catch up on... this is the best start I can think of."
Argh! Nooooo!
I've read it. Quite bizzare, even if interesting.
Most places you work, there will be some formal "process" that is perceived to let the factory model of production be applied to software development. There are two parties that have a vested interest in this: those that push a particular design process (typically CASE tool vendors), and those that want close estimates and the ability to interchange designers and programmers at will (managers).
Unfortunately, ANY such process, while it may have it's benefits, isn't perfect. True wisdom is knowing when "the Process" doesn't apply.
A few thoughts:
1) You can't think of everything up front, no mater HOW GOOD you think you are. This only works for small systems and systems with few well-defined intercomponent interfaces. You'll struve for the latter, but you won't get it first time around (or even second), but you'll get closer every time.
2) Anything which divorces implementation from design runs the usual risks associated with multiple views of the same think. Code often gets out of sync with UML, for example, though this can be audited for, and incrementally corrected. I do this CONSTANTLY. It is a form of overhead, though, and must be taken into account.
3) While metrics are great for predicting project side and time, collecting them often brings up a Heisenberg Uncertantly Principle effect: the mere act of measurement distorts that being measured. In some cases this can slow down the productivity of your best people to that of the mean -- that's expensive because you're best are likely an order of magnitude more productive than your worst, and so generate far more metrics to collect, even though many of them are useless. This flies directly in the face of rapid prototyping where the goal is to make things with the intent of throwing them away.
4)Don't waste your time auditing for mistakes that you are very unlikely to make. Of course, you need to collect some metrics to find out what mistakes each individual DOES make, but, in the absense of these, most programmers and designers have a good idea of where the mine fields are and ALREADY take extra care.
5)Don't come up with a "one size fits all" audit procedure. Some things are hard to audit for, and not all reviewers will have the skill to do this.
6)Do try to get the machine to do most of the work. If there is a "coding style standard", invest in a prettyprinter program instead of having people count spaces. Reading other's code isn't the same as iteratively developing your own. For example, I like my code to be fairly dense, so more of it fits into an editor window. This way, I can review the last thing I coded for correctness while I code the next one.
7)If something is too error-prone for some to use, but a great productivity booster to others, do let those others use it with the caveat that with this freedom comnes responsibility.
8)Remember that programmers and designers are not interchangable - the difference between the best and worst will be on about one order of magnitude (i.e. a factor of 10). Do not fall into the trap of hindering your best because the average has difficulty understanding a particular technique - if it is well documented (say anything in "Design Patterns", or even "The Art of Computer Programming" (I'm dating myself here), it should be fair game, and the onus on the neophyte to learn from it.
9)Remember to not etch process in stone. Third-party code you license will likely NOT follow your coding standards, and woe unto him who changes it when it comes time to integrate a source upgrade. Neither is it perfect. Don't trust the documentation -- read the code. If I had a dollar for everytime I say code not match documentation, I'd be rich.
10)Document what matters, and keep it short. The basic idea on a design or sub-design should be expressable in no more than a page or two. Don't linger on unnecessary details unless it is a code API.
11)Be flexible. While your process may be best 95% of the time, you will be burned when you try to apply it the other 5% of the time.
12)Know when to violate process, and how to weigh the risks of doing so. There is certainly risk here, but it is not infinite, and it might be far less than the risk of not violating process. This usually happens when (a) schedules are tightened unexpectedly, and/or (b) you run into the 5% scenario that your process handles badly.
13)Don't get bogged down in overhead. If you make a one line change that corrects a clear oversight, don't fill in a three page form, unless the oversight looks like it may be a systemic problem.
14)Finally, never assume anything. You're always playing the odds. Learn to manage uncertainty.
1) Companies have a right to use humour in their commercials. Pepsi hats, jackets, bags, skateboards, etc are OBVIOUSLY not the on the same level as a FREAKIN JET. Any moron can see that. Yes. ANY MORON.
Well, yes, except this wasn't simply a commercial. It was a promotion with points redemable for prizes. The laws tend to be strict in such cases to make it difficult for the company to say, "we were kidding". The underlying principle here is that the expense of a disclaimer in such a case is trivial to the overall cost of the promotion, so why not the disclaimer?
2) You people are the reason people who make pet shampoo have to put warning like "Don't microwave pet to dry" and their bottles. "But it didn't say!" Hey! I got this knife, and it didn't say not to stab anyone! I'm gonna sue!
Again, the purpose of a promotion is to give things away or offered in redemption for some premium. It is reasonable the presume that the things depicted as being given away actually will be. It would not be reasonable to presume that one could actually FLY the jet.
3) You're supporting frivolous law suits. This man KNEW it was a joke. Do you HONESTLY BELIEVE that he thought he was going to get the plane? Hell no, he even raised money for the law suit BEFORE TRYING TO GET THE PLANE!
Here,you may have a point. If Pepsico can show that he THOUGHT it was a joke, they can call him on it. However, I see nothing wrong in raising money for a suit to collect something that Pepsico could reasonably be expected to DENY having offered. This is not the same as thinking it was a joke, just an error in Pepsico's judgement.
4) If you guys had your way every comedian would have to stop at the end of each joke and explain that it was just a joke.
No, clearly from context, one knows that comedians in a club or on TV are telling jokes and are not to be taken seriously.
5) I'm going to go sue segfault for their articles!!! Who cares if they're obviously bogus, I'm too stupid to realize it!
Except they're not offering you anything. Pepsico was.
6) The taco bell comercial where the dog is having a lawn sale where everything is $.39.... I mailed in $.39 for the Baby Grand piano.. I didn't get it!! LAWYER!!!
Here there is a depiction of a lawn sale, but no indication that it is open to YOU.
Obviously I think Pepsico goofed on this one, and should cough up the valye of the Jet, if they can't produce the jet itself.
Oh, and regarding the lady who was too "stupid" to know not to hold a cup of coffee between her legs in a moving car... apparantly she first tried to collect medical expenses, and when McD brushed her off she sued on the grounds that the coffee was too hot to consume. Apparantly, in the state where the event took place, food and beverages sold in a restaurant must be fit for immediate consumption, and had this been the case, here burns would not have been so severe. Perhaps she was willing to risk a minor burn, but not 3rd degree burns.
Me bad. 'Twas Newfoundland that joined Canada in '49, methinks, not PEI. Working too hard.
One of the requirements for Prince Edward Island to join Canada as a Province in 1949 was that the Canadian Constitution be amended to decree the colour of margerine in Prince Edward Island.
Given that kind of lunacy (I can say disparaging things like that, having lost my Canadian residency, but retaining Citizenship), Secretary of Coca-Cola doesn't strike me as all that silly.
And why is this a problem? After all, Gates has done nothing the prevent those who would make something better for themselves from doing so: [GNU]/Linux is proof of this.
Of course, the screams go up, you can't make money "selling Linux" (without something else on the side, like support). You can't buy a Linux distribution or get it pre-installed with the same ease. Finally, Billy-G's got all the distribution mechanisms sown up tight pushing his garbage around.
All true. But, all irrelevant.
The world doesn't owe you a profit -- if people value what you make (even if it is garbage) you will make one.
The world doesn't have to bend to your desires or make your life more convenient. In short, the world doesn't owe you the ability to get a Linux distro the way you might want to. There aren't any Indian restaurants close to where I live and I like Indian food. That's my tough -- I can buy a cookbook and prepare Chicken Vindaloo myself if I want.
If you want something better than Windoze, build it yourself. The freedom to do that, and to cooperate with others to the same ends is the only thing the world "ows" you.
Clearly, enough people thought it worthwhile to improve and expand on Linus Torvalds' personal operating system itch. They (we) did it not to "get rich" but to build somethibg better for ourselves. That this goal was achieved, beyond anyone's wildest dreams, serves to prove that Billy-G is no impedement what so ever to personal and collective effort.
Those who despise him for his wealth are just envious bastards who would think nothing of stealing if they could get away with it.
Of course, he still flogs useless garbage, IMNSHO, but if people are willing to buy it, who am I to interfere?
While I love C++ (when I'm not hacking together some assember - what a paradigm shift), as with all powerful things, the language can be horribly abused: derivation in place of aggregation, and so forth.
C++ adds to C the sort of things that serious programmers need to manage large projects. In many cases these things are overkill for small ones and just obfuscate things. Of course, it has a strong OO background (but that just reflects that sometimes an object-programming paradigm is what is desired).
To truely appreciate what C++ can do fo you, read "Design Patterns" by Gamma, Helm, et. al.
Whereas the U.S.A. has the oft-glorified (yet, correctly identified as a scavanger) bald eagle, Canada's national symbols are a rodent and a leaf.
To wit: the beaver and the maple tree.
"Statisfaction guaranteed or your money cheerfully refunded," or something like that was their slogan.
Think about it: what defines "satisfaction"? The consumer, 100%. That's quite a tall promise to make.
But, in those days (the 60s) people were honest - they wouldn't order a bunch of new furniture, fora party, and request that they be refunded three days later because they weren't satisfied.
Now, I really, really, REALLY, want there to be a film adaptation of Neuromancer, don't get me wrong. But now that Stanley Kubrick is dead, I seriously doubt that anyone can do it justice.
/. headline, I realized that this latest effort will either
While my first reaction was, "Oh, YESSS!" when reading the
a) fizzle out in pre-production;
b) suck really badly;
c) prove that Gibson was a one hit literary wonder (well, two: "Burning Chrome" was a great prequel/anthology, but "Count Zero" and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" were lacking), if he has anything to do with the screen play.
BTW, has anyone seen the North American release of "Eyes Wide Shut" yet? Do you know if Kubrick approved the editing necessary for the NC-17 rating? (I don't care how much nudity is in the original -- if Kubrick though some was unnecessary, I'm willing to see a cut version, if not, then no way.)